Transcript
A (0:00)
Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of Business Lunch with your hosts, me, Roland Frazier, and the wonderful Ryan Deiss. For 125 years, marketers have insisted that the typical customer buying journey goes through four stages. Awareness, consideration, purchase, and loyalty. But in 2025, that customer journey is all but dead. Modern customers no longer move step by step. Very often, the entire buying process comes down to a single moment in time that transforms into a transaction. And many of the brands that are winning right now aren't the ones with the biggest budgets or the flashiest celebs. They are the ones that know this fame does not equal trust. And without trust, fame doesn't sell. When you get trust right, you can collapse the customer journey and buying funnel from seeing to swiping. In this episode, we're going to break down how all of this is working. We're going to share with you the three types of trusts that you need to master in order to own the trust to transaction funnel. And we're going to give you case studies, examples, and action steps to deploy the strategy to build your own trust to transaction funnels for your business, regardless of what industry you're in. Ryan, are we just hyping this, this traditional funnel is dead thing, or do you think this is something that's really happening?
B (1:14)
No, I mean, I think it's all hype. I think this entire episode is just one big marketing hype fest. It's clickbait.
A (1:21)
I like it.
B (1:21)
And we're not going to deliver on it at all. Yeah, no, I mean, look, I think it is safe to say that on one hand, everything has changed, and on another hand, this is how it's always been. What we've seen in the past is consumers were forced to buy a certain way because they didn't have a choice. Right. If you wanted to buy something, especially in like, B2B, you essentially had to go through a particular sales process. You didn't have another choice. And it was. This was the case in a lot of consumer buying process as well. There just weren't a lot of options. If you wanted to learn about a product, you had to talk to a salesperson, you had to go into a store. There just weren't a lot of other ways to get information in the buying process. That's not the case anymore. And so I think what we're seeing right now is just consumers doing what they've always wanted to do now that they have the ability to do it. So on one hand, everything has changed. On the other hand, it's no different at all.
A (2:23)
So the changes in the funnel. And kind of starting with trust being an important thing, I wanted to kind of talk about it in the context of we talk about trust agents in advertising, that you get somebody that's famous. We've done it for our events. Do you get somebody that's really well known? You do it to sell products, and that person basically says, you know, hey, I use this and therefore you should too, because I'm famous. That still works, but the risk is just so giant. And an example I thought that was good is Sydney Sweeney in the recent American Eagle ads. So American Eagle is a denim and apparel retailer for those of you don't know. And what the ad said was, Sydney Sweeney delivers this pun, and she says, genes are passed down from parents to offspring. My genes are blue. Sydney Sweeney has great jeans. That's the, the thing. And it's, you know, so she's selling blue jeans, making the pun Dr. If you will. Right. So, you know, critics, you know, it was controversial, which is definitely good, I think these days. Critics, of course, they're, they're always everywhere. They saw eugenics undertones, you know, racism, maybe culture, you know, culture kind of flared up over it. Trump praised the ad, you know, academics slammed it. But the results were undeniable. 700,000 new customers, 40 billion impressions, and the stock goes up 30 to 38%. I mean, that's pretty powerful. And I don't know what they paid her, but let's say it was a few million bucks. I mean, worth it, right? But the challenges are, you know, what if you don't have millions of dollars? What if, you know, somebody like Sydney Sweeney doesn't seem like a fit for your ad? And what if it doesn't work and you just end up broke like many companies that spent the wad on a Super bowl ad, and then that was kind of like, you know, what's your business plan? Super Bowl? So I guess a couple questions, but let's start. Ryan, why would you say that this kind of controversial campaign worked instead of imploding like the, what was it? Kendall Jenner with the Pepsi ad that just like, you know, blew up and they took it down almost overnight?